“I don’t know what exactly brings me happiness, as in I don’t know if I want to have that one single thing…” – Someone, somewhere, once
In 1884, a twenty-nine-year-old named Thomas Stevens paid $110 dollars for a bicycle. A 50 pound Columbia Ordinary, “high wheeler” or “penny farthing;” a common bicycle with a large front wheel, made of wood with rubber tires, that had no gears and was so uncomfortable it was nicknamed “bone-crusher.”
Thomas Stevens did not know how to ride a bicycle. He had always wanted to learn. And see the Sierra Nevada mountains (the two are unrelated). So he packed a pair of socks, a shirt, a bedroll, pistol, and “a gossamer rubber coat I could use as a tent,” and left San Francisco on his penny farthing, on the 22nd of April.
He crossed the mountains. Falling often. Falling so often he took to wearing a metal helmet. Pushing often. Pushing the bicycle almost as far as he actually rode it. And reached Utah, then Wyoming, then Boston on the 4th of August, 3,700 miles later. He had learned to ride a bicycle, and used it to cross a continent.
He had encountered snow, Indians, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, other cyclists, people in small towns who eyed him with suspicion, swampy routes and arid, steep terrains and twenty days of a total of 104, of constant, pouring rain,
and vistas of a beauty beyond any he could have imagined.
In Boston, he was greeted by crowds, interviewed by magazines. Curious, befuddled crowds. Perplexed magazines. There had been no purpose, mission, objective, utility to his journey. Nothing to prove, disprove, discover, conquer. He had wanted to go, see. So he went, and saw. And decided to keep going,
to New York, where he and his bicycle boarded a steamer to Liverpool. From there, he biked across England, crossed the Channel, then cycled across France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slavonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and in Turkey,
paused in Constantinople, to rest, replace parts of his penny farthing, and purchase a better pistol; he had almost been robbed. Then he kept going.
Anatolia, Armenia, Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran… where the severity of winter required he pause again. He was hosted by the Shah in Tehran. When the weather improved, he took off.
From Iran, he tried, and failed, to enter Siberia, so went instead through Afghanistan, where he was arrested, then released, then crossed the Caspian Sea. Baku, Batoum, Constantinople again, Calcutta, Hong Kong, to Souhteast China … in the 1880s, on a bicycle, on uncharted routes, unpaved roads, with no knowledge of language or culture, no professional gear… to Japan, where he cycled to Yokohoma, completing the journey of 13,500 miles (21,726 km), becoming the first person to cycle around the world on a penny farthing.
“Instead of going round the world with a rifle, for the purpose of killing something – or with a bundle of tracts, in order to convert somebody – this bold youth simply went round the globe to see the people who were on it; and since he always had something to show them as interesting as anything that they could show him, he made his way among all nations,” wrote a journalist in 1885.
More than a century later, someone else, somewhere, wrote:
“I love climbing, but then again so do I love coffee and reading books, nature, sex and a host of things that can happen in places and moments that I probably would not be able to enumerate. Not sure if that sounds like the plight of a man who hasn’t yet figured what makes him happy (or what happy actually entails, if anything at all), or if I am scraping at a vague and distant concept of ‘resilient cosmopolitan happiness’ that survives hardships…
(which I find life has a knack for throwing at you)
I’d love to have that one thing that brings me joy and some sort of recognition. But I don’t think I have that, nor do I think I would really wish it upon myself.
There are SO MANY THINGS, Yara. Life gets to be amazing if you build some form of mechanism to deal with the wavering of the ups and downs. My days make me smile and I marvel at all the people and things around me with ever renewed amazement…
My aim is to travel around Europe, visit friends, with my foldable Brompton bicycle in the train, and spend time in different places…”
Dear someone, somewhere, right now,
do it.